


for love itself may need a time of sleep

by strikinglight



Series: as trees let go their leaves [3]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: F/M, Family, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Post-Game(s), Wartime Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-18 20:16:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7329280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It doesn’t seem right to demand more than what he has now—not after all the mornings she gave him, not when his sunniest skies were always in her hair. So today Kaze waits, open-eyed, receives what light he can and offers up his most earnest thanks in return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for love itself may need a time of sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hachimitsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hachimitsu/gifts).



It’s no surprise that at the wedding feast all the guests want to dance with the bride.

When the wine is running freely and the roast boar in the middle of the long table has been picked down to its bones, and the celebratory fire lit in the center of their camp, they come for her, one at a time. First Gunter and his surprisingly impressive repertoire of waltzes, then Laslow, then Niles, and on and on through the evening.

Each time there’s a deference to the approach, a glance toward Kaze and an unasked question. Azura speaks for them both when she answers, laughing, that her groom does not dance. And it’s true—Kaze _doesn’t_ dance, but he’s watched her enough times to know how easily her smiles come when she’s out on the floor, so each time he lets her go.

After all, the evening is not only theirs. The evening is everyone’s. Knowing this it’s easy for him to relinquish her hand and his monopoly on her attention, and instead watch as she skips and turns feather-light in the glow of the fire, hair coming loose and spilling flowers one by one across the ground.

“Some husband you are.” Silas forgoes the dancing in favor of more wine, likely a decision made in light of Corrin’s choice to serve as second fiddle in the impromptu string quartet otherwise composed of Elise and her retainers. Needless to say the engagement leaves her unable to take the floor with him or anyone else, and Kaze spares him a pitying look as he lets his head drop down toward the table. “Giving her away like that when you haven’t even taken the marriage-bed.” A deep, heavy sigh. All the sorrows of the world on his shoulders. “At least it’s your tent she’ll be coming home to at the end of the night, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t envy me my tent, at least, if I were you.” The thought is disquieting enough to merit another mouthful of wine. If he drinks deep and sits with his face toward the fire, maybe the nerves won’t show. “I have nothing to offer her. I barely have a bed to sleep on.”

“Should’ve thought about that before you asked her to marry you, m’boy.”

Silas doesn’t see his face flush. He probably can’t see much of anything at all, slumped forward like this with his head pillowed on his folded arms, face turned down out of sight. Unfortunately all of Kaze’s attempts to help his friend—maybe not where matters of the heart are concerned, but at least in terms of things like getting him to straighten up, drink some water—are stalled by the end of the latest song and the unpredicted arrival of Xander. More to the point, a Xander who marches up to the table with the full power of his royal bearing behind him, thundering “Suzukaze!”

“M-Milord?” He’s mortified by the way he squeaks the word, but he can’t help it.

“Suzukaze.” Xander has Azura on one arm. Upon close inspection it becomes abundantly clear that she’s the one holding him steady, rather than the other way around. “By order of your future king.” His brow is furrowed in an expression of intense concentration that’s well-known to Kaze by now, but not like this. Never like this, red in the face and hair in disarray, each word pronounced with the heaviness and precision of a sword stroke so as not to slur. “Come down here and give your bride a dance.”

This is followed, unhelpfully, by a series of hoots and whoops from the assembly on the dance floor. Kaze remains where he is, transfixed by the indecision.

“My brother is drunk.” From his seat further up the table Leo sweeps a mailed hand through the air, nearly slamming Niles across the jaw with his gauntlet in the process, but the latter catches him by the wrist and settles his arm back down with the undisturbed impassiveness of someone long used to going through these motions. Leo’s other arm is thankfully pinned between a catatonic Odin’s head and the table, and cannot join the fray. “Xander is drunk, and so am I. It does not matter. Dance, Suzukaze. Your princes command it.”

With two inebriated princes and the eyes of an army on him, the decision is made. It’s helped along, too, by a hearty slap on the back from Silas—delivered without so much as raising his head—to send him stumbling awkwardly to his feet and around the table. (That will be a sizeable bruise in the morning, he thinks, no two ways about it.)

Azura waits for him with her hair half-undone and a giggle hidden behind her sleeve, having relinquished Xander to Camilla’s studious—and pointedly sober—care. She’s ready to catch him by the wrists when he reaches her, pulling him forward a little to stand in the light.

“You’ll have to take lead, milady.” Part of him hopes this doesn’t foreshadow their life together. Another part sees the way she smiles, backlit by the fire, the laughter all lit up like gold in her eyes, and thinks he would not care even if it were.

“I will show you,” she says. “Nothing is easier.”

The music swells again, and they begin.

 

* * *

 

The wagon into which Kaze’s packed his life and his children’s lives trundles up a road still rutted and muddy from yesterday’s rain, heading east. He has the reins in one hand and a map of Windmire unfolded across his lap, and Silas in the front seat next to him pitching and rocking, boneless as a ragdoll. 

“Look at us.” The skies above are as overcast as ever, but today Silas’ mood is sunny enough to cut through the grey. “What a pair of old men driving this cart. Somebody give me some straw to chew on.”

“We’re hardly old men, for all our grown-up children.” Kaze smiles, gentle and distracted. His eyes are on the road, where they ought to be, but every so often they flick upward toward the sky. Watching for a good wind, a break in the clouds. “Furthermore, I am driving, and you are merely sitting. Unhelpfully.”

“I’ll be much more helpful when we start unloading, you have my word.” His hand goes over his heart in imitation of a knight’s solemn vow, and Kaze chuckles. “But, for that matter, where are _your_ grown-up children?”

“Midori’s needed at a birthing-bed in the Northern Fortress. She had her brother fly her so they’d be quick.” _Being grownups,_ he thinks, dryly. But he’d assured them he could finish the work of moving in on his own. He hadn’t hoped for company, so Silas had come as a surprise. “You’re sure Lady Corrin can spare you? Her all-important Captain of the Guard?”

Silas blushes as fiercely as a boy. Whether it’s the title that does it or the sound of Corrin’s name—still, after all this time—is anybody’s guess. “I already told you, she practically ordered me out the door. Said she’d have my hide if I didn’t help you settle into the new place.”

The new place. He hadn’t wanted to ask for it, really, the day she had called him before the king to ask him what they could give him in return for his service. He remembers how they looked then—how they must have all looked, in those first few cautious, tenuous months following the end of the war, like they couldn’t believe the quiet, like any careless move would shatter it. Xander upright in the chair with the thorny black metal of the king’s crown heavy across his brow, Corrin standing at attention beside him, the Yato at her hip the brightest light in the room.

Kaze had demurred, of course. He’d said all the words, had told them that he wasn’t worthy, that it had always pleased him best to serve, and it had sounded like the truth. But they had insisted. They had pressed him, and he’d given way and told them what was in his heart.

“A house, then, if it pleases my lord.” He had been proud of how calm he sounded, speaking about the last thing in this life he’d ever let himself want. “I promised her a house.”

Such a look had passed between them then, the faintest flicker of hurt you could only see if you looked closely at Corrin’s eyes, the set of Xander’s jaw. He’d known everything that went unsaid that day, Azura’s presence so palpable they could almost see her standing there before the throne. They would never have asked that sacrifice of her. They thought they had protected her. For his part he would have wanted to tell them he understood, that there was nothing to forgive, but his voice deserted him and he could only bow his head in gratitude.

It had been enough for Xander. He had said only “I will see it done,” and neither moved nor spoken another word as Kaze rose and departed, leaving him alone with his own ghosts. It had not been enough for Corrin. Corrin had followed him from the room, tailing him wordlessly like a phantom down the long hallway, fitting her steps to his. Corrin had held him as he stopped in the shadow of a pillar, clutched his head in his hands, and wept.

Now it makes sense to Kaze why Silas is here, why she’d made the call to take two of her most trusted captains off the town patrol on the same day. She had meant one to help the other start to build a new home, make him laugh, ensure he wasn’t alone. If he knows her at all she’ll still be thinking she has nothing to give him, still torn into pieces over the fear that it does not suffice.

“I think that’s the one.” Silas’ voice interposes, pulling him away from his thoughts, and Kaze marks where the road rises and crests at the top of a hill. He sees the outline of a roof, a stand of trees.

Quiet, Corrin had promised him. Comfortable enough for three, with open space for riding, and an herb garden to tend. And east means it will be the first to see the sun on clear days.

 

* * *

 

Part of him expects things to be different afterwards, but everything feels the same. He packs up his few possessions and moves them into her tent—they don’t have much between them anyway, they agree, though she does have the benefit of more space by virtue of her status. The term of address he uses for her is still most often “milady,” for all that this raises more than a few eyebrows and in particular sends Corrin’s eyes rolling heavenward in despair. Aside from the new living arrangements and the fact that they are more often the subject of merciless teasing from friends and strangers alike, everything _is_ the same. 

He had prided himself, when they were younger, on knowing far more about her than anyone else. She’d already told him so many things then, about her mother, about her childhood in Nohr. He’d known she was a strong swimmer, that she could hold her breath for exactly two minutes and twenty seconds, because he’d sat on the shore of the lake behind the castle once while she dove for ore and counted until her head broke the surface. And he’d listened to all the ghost stories she so delighted in, offering the few tales he remembered from his childhood in the mountains in exchange, even if the telling and the listening both left him on high alert and unable to sleep.

Now, though, there is even more to know. He learns that she never sleeps through the night but tosses fitfully for hours. He learns that he’ll lose her every now and then to spells of silence and a creeping, persistent sadness he has no answer to, and that the only solution is to hold her through them until morning comes. He learns about the scar high up on her leg from where she’d been burned with a branding iron as a little girl, the flesh white and puckered and stretched tight. He learns that she is ticklish all the way up her sides, that she likes it when he buries his fingers in her hair, that she has a habit of digging her nails in to remind herself how solid he is.

“You’re so much stronger than you look,” he remarks one night, muffled against the pillow. “You may draw blood one day, even.”

All is dark around them, so dark he sees nothing but a shadowy outline out of the corner of one eye as she leans over him and traces careful fingertips over the marks. They’re deep, surprisingly so, a scattering of small sickle-shaped indentations across his back and arms and shoulders—in the morning he doesn’t doubt he’ll check the mirror and find the skin around them red and angry where the blood beats beneath.

“I’m sorry.” She sounds contrite enough, but then lips follow those fingers and he feels his heart quicken all over again. “I’m sorry. You know what I’m like.”

Her breath feathers out over his skin, sends a tremor down his spine. Propelled forward by it he turns, reaching up so he can catch her by the arms and pull her down to him. “No one would believe me if I told them what I knew.”

“That’s because no one knows what you know,” she says, a smile in her voice only he knows the sound of. “You are the oldest friend I have.”

“Friend, the lady says, but the ring on her finger says otherwise.”

That makes her laugh; he draws her closer and laughs along. On nights like this one she is always laughing, always warm and substantial and _here,_ leaning her face close to his, sharing his breath. Kaze counts these nights, just as he counts the long sad silent ones, and keeps them both near. He can do no less, because they are all her. Because she gives them to him.

 

* * *

 

Some nights Kaze sits awake, undisturbed now by the restlessness of other bodies beside him but still hearing everything too clearly. His children breathe in the rooms down the hall. Outside, there’s the wind in the trees. The owl on the wing. So much to listen to he cannot imagine himself ever sleeping through the night again. And yet through the hours he remains alert, on edge, aware of something missing—waiting for a whisper close by his ear or the strains of a song in the distance, wishing desperately for it.

Some nights he rehearses the stories she used to tell him on the march, the two of them huddled under their one blanket like children, fingers entangled and faces pressed close together to catch each whisper. For some reason it’s the sad ones that come most easily to him these days; he remembers the heron maiden, the seal-wife, the woman made of snow, finds that at the heart of it all they are all the same story. A man falls in love with a woman who is not of this world. At times he knows this. More often he does not, at least not at the beginning. They marry and are happy for a time, but always their happiness depends upon a hidden thing—some secret, some promise not to pry too deeply or look too long or speak of what she is to others. Always the man, because he is only human, makes the mistake that breaks everything. He asks too many questions, wants too much. Every story ends with a disappearance.

(In some versions of the story there are children. In most of them, and for this he is especially thankful, there are not.)

He wonders at such times if she had been trying to tell him something. Once in a while he feels like arguing with her that this is not their story— _I let you keep your secrets, I was as good to you as I knew how to be_. Other times, increasingly these days, he thinks of how she would have answered such childishness—he can almost feel her hands push open-palmed against his chest, hear her breathless and laughing _stop, stop, no more questions—_ and he does not argue.

Some nights he lies still and does nothing but remember. The details—her eyes, the curve of her cheek, the bones of her spine beneath his fingertips—are so close to him now, but the terror is never far behind. He fears that one day he will wake up, heavy-eyed and lightheaded, and find he’s begun to forget.

It’s tempting to think he had just dreamed all of it. It’s not such a far cry to think that someone like her could have existed only in his imagination, that nothing in this world could contrive to produce someone so strange, someone so tangled and yet so beautiful. In some ways that would be easier to accept. But he knows the truth is something else.

He opens his palms, closes his eyes. He feels himself take his next breath, draw it in long and slow.

 _Stay, Azura,_ he wants to whisper to the house, silent all around him as though underwater. _Stay in this breath._

 

* * *

 

One especially long night he reaches for her in his sleep and finds the space beside him empty, wakes to find her sitting up in their bed. 

“Azura.” Her knees are pulled up close to her chest, the sheets drawn tight around her to keep the cold air from touching her skin. She doesn’t move or speak. Neither does he sit up to follow her—instead his hand settles at the small of her back, tracing the curve of bone there. “Azura, come back.”

When she is far away, lost above his head like this, he calls her name until she hears him. She moves her head now, stirred to awareness by the sound of his voice. Somehow he knows she’s returning from the same place each time, the same lightless, deep interior.

“You don’t want to talk about it.” It’s not a question, but she shakes her head just the same.

“I can’t.” She falls silent again before adding, with some reluctance, “It hurts.”

“That you can’t?”

She nods. He is quiet awhile before he pulls gently at her waist, guiding her down until he can cradle her against him with one arm. Her body follows without resistance, curling into his side, long silk sheet of her hair half-covering them both, and with a jolt he remembers how small she is. Delicate-boned, like a bird, whereas in daylight she stands so straight he almost thinks her made of iron.

“The ninja deal mainly in secrets, you know.”

Her eyes slide up to his face, wondering. He doesn’t know if what he has to say will help her sleep; maybe what matters more is that he speaks with a certainty she can measure.

“Our masters teach us how to dig them up. How to take them from others.” She frowns a little. He figures he shouldn’t elaborate, and goes on. “But how to keep them, most of all, and hold on to them no matter what happens—through threats or bribes or battle or pain. Die with them, even.” The frown deepens, and she looks half about to ask him what he’s telling her all of this for when his hand moves at her back again, drawing slow idle circles until she relents and relaxes against him. “Shhh, listen. Hear me out a moment. Because of this there are things we hide even from our own.

“My twin brother and I—you remember him, don’t you?” This nearly wins a smile from her. He can see her lips quirk the slightest bit to one side, press together again into a thoughtful line as she gives him all her attention. It’s amusing to imagine that in her mind the image of Saizo has remained fixed through the years, frozen at seventeen or eighteen—the rude boy from the forge who thought it beneath him to say her name. It takes away some of the ache of having to speak about him. “Even growing up we were taught to hold things back, not to talk unnecessarily or reveal ourselves too much. Now I find there’s little we do know about one another, even if we did share the womb.”

He remembers this as one of the first lessons he was ever taught, in the distant dark of his childhood, negotiating silence on his own. Sometimes there is no better way to protect something—your life, the lives of others. It’s the only way he knows how to make sense of these small withdrawals of hers. Much as he wants to talk her out of it, convince her it isn’t necessary, he knows such things are not always for him to decide.

Kaze swallows all his doubts. He lets her protect him.

“So be at peace, Azura.” He takes care to look at her as he says it, to reinforce for her the truth of it. “Keep your secrets. You will have me all the same.”

Her only response is to tighten her hold on him, burying her face in his shoulder. If there are tears in her eyes he can’t see them, but the press of her arm around his ribcage is so fierce it aches, and that is enough to tell him all he needs to know.

 

* * *

 

They share guard duty outside the audience chamber the day the Hoshidan delegation arrives, the elder brother as representative of the queen’s personal guard, the younger by request of the Nohrian king—each utterly unaware of his partner’s identity until he arrives and sees the other face to face. 

One scowls. The other smiles. They take their places on either side of the high doors without a word.

Kaze thinks to himself, for what might be the thousandth time since the end of the war, that Xander is too open-handed, too generous with his gifts. The way Saizo glowers down at the floor suggests he thinks much the same of Hinoka. Preoccupied as they are with matters of state, they don’t miss a thing.

“You look terrible.” Surprisingly, it’s Saizo who breaks the silence.

Kaze inclines his head, unperturbed. “As do you, my brother.”

He knows how the past months have whittled away at him. Even without light to see by he can make out the shape of his own weariness in his twin’s stance, mark the shadows that fall across his face. Saizo looks diminished now too, as though someone had carved out his gut with a dull knife and left him with a hole that would never quite close. Kaze thinks he understands, though he’ll never say so out loud.

Saizo’s laugh is a rasping bark in the quiet of the empty hallway. Underneath it Kaze hears fire. “Better that I had died.”

Better that he had lost an arm or a leg or a chunk of his heart. Better that he had died. Kaze knows how it must feel, but—

_Do not say that. Don’t ever say that._

The words nearly outrun him—he barely remembers what it’s like to feel so fiercely—but he knows Saizo wouldn’t take kindly to being spoken to in imperatives. Not with the only person he’ll ever willingly take orders from gone, and the two of them left behind here to grope their way forward in the dark.

“Don’t take the evening meal here.” There’s no talking him out of moods like this. This, at least, has not changed—the only real way around it is to be with him and say nothing, to feed him and dog his steps and force him not to be alone. “Come to my house instead.”

The invitation is so ordinary it jolts them both. It’s strange to remember that Saizo has yet to meet his children in any proper sense of the word, may not even know that Kaze had married. For his part, Kaze finds himself wondering if he has anybody waiting for him where he came from, who he returns to at the end of these long journeys. But they’ve gone so long without each other they don’t know how even to begin asking those kinds of questions.

“You’ve gone soft, Suzukaze.”

Maybe. Or maybe it’s that he’s never stopped being soft. This has been their truth since they were boys—shy, biddable Kaze, gentle Kaze with the tender heart no amount of training could petrify to stone, Saizo all flinty eyes and words like burning brands. Like night and day, he remembers everyone saying. This, too, has somehow managed not to change, for everything they’ve done and seen and been forced to become in their time apart.

“I live near the woods by the eastern wall,” he says. “Will you come?”

For a long moment Saizo is quiet, inscrutable, studying Kaze over the top of the mask that remains strapped so tightly over his face. Puzzling, perhaps, over what he sees.

“I will,” he answers at last. Kaze lets it lie.

 

* * *

  

Shigure is a newly weaned infant when they first come to the Deeprealms, seeking out the quietest village they can find, the warmest house, the kindest pair of arms that opens to receive him. Azura tells him the days they spend there make up the longest goodbye she’s ever said. When they return, they find less than half a day has passed in their world.

On their first visit, he is four and has to learn who they are, has to be prompted by his caretakers to match their faces with the words they’ve taught him— _Mama, Papa._ He loves them at once, of course. He must, because his child’s heart beats closest to them in spite of the distance, past distortions of space and time. Azura smiles and lifts him up in her arms and holds him on her knees, but Kaze still finds her pale and shivering in their guest room with her hands pressed to her mouth, and it takes him half the night to convince her that this is not abandonment.

On the second he is eight, and they’re determined to look for ways to make the time count. Azura begins teaching him to sing, and their voices ring so sweetly between the pine trees that Kaze swears he sees the birds pause on the branches. Meanwhile Kaze teaches him to sit a horse, helps him walk off his first falls, expresses only the expected amount of concern when he points at the silhouettes of the pegasi on the wing in the distance and asks when he can ride “the pretty ones that fly.”

They know, keenly, that none of it is enough. Their memories are all in fragments, scattered pieces snatched and pocketed whenever they can, and in the interim the lost years remain lost. They think of Midori, tucked away like a secret in the nook of some cousin star; Shigure knows his little sister is alive somewhere, knows her name and birthday and the color of her hair, but in all other ways they’re barely real to each other. They’ve been without each other all their lives.

The children are safe, Kaze always says, and he knows the words are for himself as much as they’ve ever been for Azura. The children are safe. That’s the price you pay.

This time, the third time around, Shigure is fourteen. He’s tall enough now to look down at Azura instead of up. It’s a sore spot that’s made sorer by the fact that he feels the need to remark on it—“Mother, you used to be so tall!”—even as he opens his arms in welcome, but at least she’s laughing as she steps forward. She pinches his cheeks fiercely before closing the embrace, and looking at them Kaze knows it is so little, compared to what they might have had, but it should do, it should do for now, when they have so little else.

But then Shigure pulls away, says “Father, mother, there’s a girl I’d like you to meet,” and Kaze’s mind is chaos all over again.

He’s not even certain he’s relieved when Shigure brings her around and they find she has four legs and a pair of wings that can carry him nearly as high as the moon. Still, they have nothing to say when he tells them what he’s named her—Aoi _,_ for blue, for sky and water and the dearest thing in all the worlds to him.

It only makes sense that Azura never quite gets over it. As is her way she frets about it all through the night, or behaves at least like she’s going to, pacing and pacing, circling the same spot so many times Kaze's certain she'll burn a hole through the floor. “What are we ever going to do about your son?”

He shrugs, face turned toward the window to hide a grin. “In this case, milady, I daresay he’s _your_ son.” 

 

* * *

  

Now and again, the spells of sadness take Shigure too, without warning. They take his songs and his smiles and his gentle conversation, force him to close in on himself. When he sits with them at the table or by the fire in the evenings only some of him is there, vacant and speechless, the rest lost in a shadowy nowhere Kaze thinks he recognizes by now. When the shadows are particularly dark Shigure isn’t there at all, taking to the skies with Aoi for hours, returning only when he’s sure that Midori is asleep and Kaze has closed the door of his room behind him.

(He never asks for help. If he weeps, he never lets them see it, though Kaze remembers hearing it a few times in the days following the last battle—standing outside a locked door in a castle he didn’t yet know his way around, listening to the shaky, hiccupping sobs, the ragged gasping. Now that they live in closer quarters such sounds have stopped entirely.)

Shigure disappears because this is how he mourns. Even when the gloom descends for days at a time Kaze stands with him, quietly tidies the room that looks each morning as if a storm has whipped through it, and sets a lantern in the window each night he spends away to help him find his way home.

His son is strong, he’s certain of that. He will endure. And some days, some very quiet days, even without asking outright, they find strength in each other. They have enough mornings like this one, mornings where they do nothing but be—Shigure standing by the downstairs window watching the ashy predawn light, Kaze nursing a cup of tea at the kitchen table after another long restless night.

“I’m to take a look at two of Lady Corrin’s broodmares today.” The words are addressed to the cup. “They’re due to foal in the spring.”

Shigure doesn’t turn from the window, but the tilt of his head changes just slightly and Kaze knows he has his attention. As the last of the tea drains away in one warm, earthy swallow, he tries a question. “Do you want to come with me?”

He stays quiet so long it would be easy to assume he hadn’t heard. But Kaze knows Shigure listens well; he’s just being careful, testing his answer.

“Can I?” It’s surprising that it comes as a question. One so timidly phrased, at that—barely an echo in the stillness of the room, unwilling to impose.

But that’s who he is, Kaze thinks. Mercurial as the skies, but brilliant, so brilliant when the sun breaks through.

“Of course,” he says. “We’ll take Aoi. The girls will love her.”

At noon they head north together to the tracts of pastureland set aside for the castle horses, and Kaze shows Shigure the paddock where the mares have been turned out. These two are named for flowers, he tells him as they skim their hands over legs and bellies, checking for tender spots or signs of injury—Violet with the black and white coat, white Foxglove with the curious eyes. He’s carefully silent over the persistence with which they bump their noses against Shigure’s arms, the tender way he strokes their long ears, delicate as skin. Later Shigure takes the saddle and the bridle from Aoi and lets her trot over to them, wings folded close to her sides in courtesy as they begin to graze.

They sit on the fence and do more nothing, Kaze swinging up with practiced ease, Shigure following more slowly, testing the rails with his hands. All around them the day unfolds itself, long and slow and idle.

“Being with your girl does them good, I think,” Kaze points out. “See how at home they look.”

Shigure’s eyes are on the horses, watching how they’ve come to stand close, snuffling at the grass, heads bent gently toward each other as if whispering. In turn Kaze watches him out of the corner of one eye. Neither of them speaking, barely even looking at each other, suspended in this tenuous peace—painfully aware of what’s missing, but holding it close regardless.

Shigure disappears, Kaze knows, in search of lost time. But someday, he thinks, Shigure will look around and remember that he belongs here, here where the days finally, finally move as they should. No one exists anymore who can take these days from him. He is found, he is safe—all he has to do is realize it and reach out and they will bring him home. But that is _his_ story.

“Anytime you need me, father,” Shigure says into the silence. Barely a murmur, but Kaze inclines his head toward it, attentive to every word. “Let me know, and I will come.”

 

* * *

 

“She’s exhausted.” Azura lifts the flap at the entrance to the medical tent, reaching through to touch Kaze on the shoulder. “I can’t wake her.”

By the look of the sky it’s near midnight, and the lamps are burning low. They find Midori in an empty cot, balled into herself for warmth, the roll of bandages she’d earlier been winding still clutched in one hand. So spent by the day’s work her body has simply surrendered.

It’s all one to Kaze, who picks her up in his arms like a child and carries her out, Azura following after she blows out the last lantern. Midori doesn’t come awake as she’s moved, barely stirs at all except to curl her body in and rest her head against his chest, and he finds he doesn’t mind the weight of her, not the least bit.

“Do you think—” Azura pauses, dancing around words no mother is easy with speaking. “Do you think I ask her to do too much?”

Azura’s question is several questions at once. Kaze tries to parse them all as he walks. Is she too young, too soft, too tender to be helping with the wounded? Should they find some other task to put her to? Did they take her too early from her safe place?

“She’s happy, isn’t she? Helping people.” Kaze has seen her—boiling water over a low fire, combing the fringes of every field and forest for new herbs. It’s the only truth that makes sense, perhaps the only one that matters. “Helping you most of all, I think.”

She falls silent. He’s seen them at work together too, the two of them and Elise with their herbs and their blades and their spells, the fragile, precious togetherness that holds them steady even among the wounded and the dying. He knows how it wears on her, how dangerous the world is, how unfit for her dear ones. On the other side of that, how badly she wants to be grateful for the presence, for the choice to stay.

“When it all ends, it would be good to find somewhere to settle.” They don’t often talk about the end of the war, their insistence upon it nearly a superstition, but he wants so much to give her something new to dream about. “Live in a house again. Would you want that?”

“Would you really give it up?” she asks. Her hands move vaguely, aimlessly through the air—she doesn’t know what she’s referring to any more than he does. “All this?”

It’s a good question; he isn’t even sure he knows the answer. He has no love for battle, for deception or espionage or skulking in the dark, but love or no love this is what he is. He wonders what it would be like to live in a world that no longer asks such things of him. A world that no longer needs him to protect it.

“It’s not impossible,” he says. “You and I already did it once.”

They hadn’t looked back, then. He does not look back, now, not with Midori in his arms and the only sound that matters for miles around the soft whistling rise and fall of her breath. Not with Azura beside him in the middle of a story that is theirs, no matter how it ends.

 

* * *

 

Midori runs a small clinic from home now, out of a workroom on the first floor that soon smells pervasively of mint leaves. She tends the herb garden behind their house and departs every so often on house calls, returns with gifts of vegetables and tea and freshly baked bread. Each day she comes home with new stories of what she’s done and seen, some of them so luridly detailed Shigure groans and turns his head away, but on the whole the battles she fights these days are simpler. Sprained ankles in the young, rheumatism in the old. Seasonal fevers. Caterpillars in the garden.

From time to time, in certain lights or from certain angles, Kaze thinks he sees something of Azura in her face. Something he recognizes in the way she frowns when lost in deep contemplation, the quiet careful movements of her hands. It’s always a small thing. He catches a glimpse, and it pricks at him.

And yet she is not Azura. She speaks readily to strangers and knows how to chatter on brightly for hours about almost nothing. Her eyes are as dark as the ones he sees looking out at him from the hallway mirror each morning. She insists at every turn that she does not know how to sing. Kaze knows that past all these things his daughter is her own person—has always been her own person, though not always by choice—and that for every memory that rushes in to interpose he’ll find something to jar him, to call him back to where they are now.

So when she asks him one afternoon if he’ll cut her hair—because it’s grown too heavy for her, and because there is too much work to be done these days for her to waste time washing and combing and tying it—it comes as no surprise. If anything the request is sensible, matter-of-fact. Right then and there he sits her down and reaches into a drawer for scissors.

“How would you like it?” he asks. The strands part under his fingers as easily as water. Briefly he remembers, feels the pain lance through him, and tamps it down.

“Maybe to here.” Fingertips at her chin, marking a line. She hasn’t asked for a mirror; he wonders if that means she’s happy to trust it to him instead. “What do you think, Father?”

It is, after all, one thing he taught her about growing herbs—that pruning is necessary for a plant to root, to flower, to put out new leaves. So much of healing is excision. And that in turn is one thing she teaches him every time she opens her eyes—there are so many ways to heal. Sometimes you need several at once. Sometimes you need whatever works.

“Lovely,” he says, and how brilliantly she smiles then.

Midori sits still. Kaze cuts. Together they watch the strands fall like silk ribbons to the floor, sky-blue on the dark wood.

 

* * *

 

After the town falls, their army files up the main street in four blunt black lines, relentless as the incoming tide.

Corrin orders all blades sheathed the moment she receives the surrender, but it’s still unreal how quick the streets are to empty out around them—doors and window shutters slamming in panic, the choking, ghostly silence that descends punctuated only by the sound of the march. Kaze walks with the rear guard and counts the rare pairs of eyes he sees watching them from between the gaps. Brave eyes, foolish eyes, eyes numb and staring. It does not matter, because they’ve killed them. They still breathe, the people behind the doors to whom those eyes belong, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve killed them even so.

Azura walks beside him, but he knows her mind is far away again. Sunk all those years in the past, where there is no war, where no killing happens. Again it doesn’t matter, because between then and now everything is the same. Every cobblestone, every shop that lines the street. That is the tailor’s, the carpenter’s, the smith’s. The flower seller’s is to the left; the potter’s, down the alley on the right. The castle stands ever before them, cutting the sky in half. He remembers it all. He knows she does too. Everything is the same.

Except that’s a lie and none of it is the same—this town and these streets and these stones and this sky. They remember it alive. What they find is all hollowed out, so empty the wind groans up the alleys as it blows through.

Azura holds her head high and looks straight ahead as they walk, face impassive as a doll’s. But Kaze’s gaze goes to her right hand, the one that carries the lance, and finds the fingers clenched and bloodless, curled like claws around the shaft.

(It comes to him then that in all the time they’ve known one another he can only think of one instance that she’s allowed herself to cry. He had come here, because she had asked him to. He had met the old woman for her and returned with a letter with flower petals pressed between the pages, and she had clung to his sleeve and sobbed.)

He reaches for her left hand, the one that wears the ring, hoping that is touch enough.

“I did follow you.” It comes out like a confession, so many years overdue. But they cannot stop to make the moment more than what it is; he doesn’t break stride, and neither does she. “The first time you went out alone.”

“I never would have guessed.” She sounds like she can’t breathe.

“You weren’t looking then.” He knows he doesn’t need to say this part—he is certain she knows it, perhaps she has always known it—but something urgent pushes at him deep within and makes him say it anyway. Maybe hearing it will center her, here at the end of all things, help her do what she must. “But I had you in my sights all along, I think.”

They hear Shigure approach before she can answer—it’s just as well, Kaze decides, he doesn’t need her to say anything—the clipped noise of a particular set of hooves on the stones, ever so slightly offbeat against the sound of the march. Then before them the lines part and he reins Aoi in, and they do stop then, even if the lines go on.

Shigure’s posture is rigid with tension. His speech, though, is soft and tentative, the words almost an apology, as if he knows what he’s intruded upon. “Lady Corrin asking for you at the front, mother.”

For the first time, Azura wavers. Her eyes go bright with pain as they shift slowly from Shigure to Kaze, again and again. He looks at her and feels his gut twist a second time. More sharply now, with more violence.

“Go, love.” He squeezes her hand one last time and releases it, and tries not to think about how her fingers slide out of his, dragging ever so slightly across his palm, lingering. “I am behind you. Go.”

She turns. Shigure reaches down to pull her up behind him, Kaze’s hands at her waist as she mounts to keep her footing sure.

“Be well, my son,” he says. The very air around them seems to tremble, everything they can see wavering now, brittle as a sheet of glass.

When Kaze clasps his arm, Shigure squeezes so hard he feels the bones of his wrist come together. “Be well, father.”

They’ve already lived through so much and not looked back, but he knows this time she'll chance one long look over her shoulder. Just one. He makes sure he’s smiling when she does.

 

* * *

 

Midori offers to sweep up, but Kaze shakes his head and takes the broom from its place against the wall, gently waving her protestations away with his free hand. He’d heard her this morning, promising Shigure the rest of the day—he knows there’s a long flight to the mountains ahead of them, the object of their quest a particular species of wild lavender that blooms in the fall. When she insists, he reaches out to ruffle her hair, and the way the wispy strands feather out around her face delights him.

“Your father isn’t so old and frail he can’t handle a little cleaning.” Even as he says it he can hear Shigure arrive—the power in a pair of wings beating the air, hooves touching down softly a little up the road. He chuckles to see Midori’s head tilt toward the sounds, following the sharp ears she’s inherited from him. “Go, my heart. I hear your brother already.”

Kaze feels rather than sees her beaming when she steps closer to him and presses a kiss to his cheek. There’s a spring in her step too as she makes for the door, but just on the threshold something stops her, has her glancing behind.

“We’ll be home by nightfall,” she says. At his nod she turns and runs out at last to where Shigure stands waiting with Aoi by his side, wind-touched and framed by the trees.

Kaze follows, hovering at a distance, leaning a little on the broom handle. There’s a pleasing counterpoint to the way his children speak to each other, a harmony running through all their interactions that he so enjoys observing—the sister ever vibrant, full of life and light, the brother gentler in his own shining.

Shigure is of the sky, Midori of the earth. Between the two of them he tells himself he still holds the whole world—all that he loves in these two voices, two pairs of eyes, two heartbeats.

“Take care of each other,” Kaze calls. Together they smile at him and lift their hands to wave and he knows it’s a given.

He feels the pain cut at him again, and it takes all his strength not to let anything show in his face. They need him steady, smiling, at ease in an empty house. So he stands and watches a little longer as Shigure mounts astride Aoi and pulls Midori up behind the saddle, their movements fluid and assured, practiced over so many repetitions. He follows their path with his eyes—Shigure spurs his pegasus first to a trot, then a canter, and then her wings unfurl and begin to beat and she’s bearing his children off the ground and up into the blue. It’s only when they’re out of sight that he remembers the broom in his hand and returns.

When he finishes with Midori’s hair he knows he’ll need to sweep the yard. The leaves have long since turned, and the earliest of them are already dropping. The rest will follow, one by one, steadily, until they cover the ground and the trees stand bare and unmoved before the approaching winter.

But oh, how quick the trees are to recover in the spring, Kaze thinks. How easily they let go, trusting what is left to endure.

In a few months’ time this little family of his will greet their first spring in the home they’ve built here. In the meantime, he passes his broom once and once again over the floor and stands by the window waiting for his children to descend like miracles, waiting for the sky to clear, waiting for the sun to come out over Nohr—because it does from time to time, in defiance of all the stories he’s been told. Sometimes only in small trickles, faint and silvery, spilling down to him through breaks in the clouds. Sometimes in full force all at once, one short-lived, brilliant burst of burning gold.

How she would have danced through these rare bright days, he thinks. Danced and danced and danced as the world healed itself around her, coming alive the way she must have seen it do in her dreams.

It doesn’t seem right to demand more than what he has now—not after all the mornings she gave him, not when his sunniest skies were always in her hair. So today Kaze waits, open-eyed, receives what light he can and offers up his most earnest thanks in return. On the other side of that waiting, there’s a morning he only sees in the distance. A _someday_ where she finds him again.

Kaze listens. When the breezes pick up and blow through the house, he hears her singing.

**Author's Note:**

> Some things you must know, here at the end:
> 
> 1\. This last installment has been produced in collaboration with [Isa](http://isnri.tumblr.com), who draws beautiful comics and is just overall a gift to the human race. [You'll find her rendition of this fic's last scene here.](http://isnri.tumblr.com/post/146764524234/as-trees-let-go-their-leaves-fire-emblem-fates)  
> 2\. The title for this installment, as well as the title of the series as a whole, are both lifted from May Sarton's [Autumn Sonnet 2 [If I can let you go as trees let go]](http://www.languageisavirus.com/may-sarton/read_autumn_sonnets.php).  
> 3\. I guess you can consider this a slight AU insofar as I did not have the moral fiber to kill Saizo??? (Not that you absolutely _have_ to, strictly speaking, but well.) We all need a tearful ninja twins reunion because everything is already terrible IDEK--
> 
> Anddd that concludes this triptych. Thank you very much for seeing me through this. <3


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